Kindness above all

George Saunders writes critically admired short stories and teaches at Syracuse University, where he delivered a widely acclaimed commencement address last year.

He advised graduates that he had scoured his personal history to consider his greatest regrets and had concluded that there was one exceeding all others.

He related that there had been a poor troubled girl in his seventh-grade class. Among other things, she chewed her hair. Everyone made fun or her, even tormented her. Young George stood by.

Then one day she was gone. Her family moved away. Saunders has no idea what became of her.

Yet hers is the face he remembers most from school. And his greatest regret is that he never extended to her an act of kindness.

What people learn as they get older and raise children and enjoy grandchildren, he told the graduates, is that kindness matters most. If he had it all to do over again, he said, he’d be kind to that girl who so often stood alone on the playground, a strand of hair in her mouth, as kids shouted, “Hair taste good?”

He told the graduates they would learn over the years about the value, indeed the imperative, of kindness. So he suggested that the advice he could offer most significantly from his decades of experience was that they get an early start. It was not to waste another day of missed opportunity to avoid future regret. It was to go forth and begin extending kindness right away.

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There must be something about the seventh grade.

That was the year the boys in my class were crowded into a bathroom on a break. I was tending to personal bathroom business while several of my classmates squared off against one boy, an unpopular one, and taunted him as “queer.”

I watched, implicitly a member of the mob.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of a young boy to come openly to his classmate’s defense in such a case, especially in 1966 in Arkansas.

But a kind word or gesture later on a personal level … I know it would make me feel better now about the boy I was then.

Kindness still is no forte of mine, obviously. The opposite, in fact, is the stock in trade of a sardonic public commentator.

In my defense, I’d contend that most of the politicians and public figures deserve what they get in this space and that I am not so much bullying as answering bullies.

But there surely was no good reason for me to have written on social media in recent days that Phil Robertson is a “duck yahoo” and “homophobic bigot.”

He-like me sometimes-mostly is simply unkind.

Robertson needs to read a little George Saunders.

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He also might read a little Tyler Smither.

I refer to a youth pastor at a Methodist church in Olive Branch, Miss.

He also is a blogger. And he wrote late last week as the Duck Dynasty debate raged that it doesn’t matter anymore what anybody thinks about the biblically decreed rightness or wrongness of homosexuality.

Gay-inclined youths are three times as likely to commit suicide as straight-inclined ones, he wrote.

Like Saunders’ classmate in the seventh grade, and like mine, those children are being tormented, bullied and made to feel alone and helpless by the harsh and ostracizing judgments society makes against them.

There comes a time, Smither wrote, to put aside ultimately unsettled arguments about “theological correctness.” There comes a time, he wrote, to abandon arguments about a passage Paul wrote eons ago.

Instead there comes a time, he wrote, to adapt to prevailing circumstance to fortify ourselves with underlying values and assume our own “moral responsibility.”

Smither wrote of the German theologian who devoted his life to his assessment of biblical concepts of nonviolence, to theological correctness. But then came Hitler. In time the German theologian put aside his allegiance to nonviolence. Instead he applied his own adapted assessment of his own moral responsibility.

What he did was conspire in an assassination attempt on Hitler.

Thou shalt not kill. But there is capital punishment. But there is war.

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So let us say you come upon a boy being taunted for his difference.

You could join the fun and quote from Romans. You could bellow like Robertson that you enjoy the opposite sex and are therefore moral and that those who enjoy the same sex are immoral.

Or you could think about George Saunders’ commencement address and Tyler Smither’s call for moral responsibility.

You might even think about Pope Francis.

He seems to be trying, as much as his organizational dogma will allow, to advocate nonjudgmental kindness and adapting to circumstance to assume moral responsibility.

Whether you deem homosexuality a sin remains your right and business, of course. Your speech and religion remain free.

But you tend not to join mobs to demand official denial of rights and tormented ostracizing of other sinners-liars or neighbor’s wife coveters or fornicators or adulterers or gamblers or thinkers of impure thoughts.

So why not step out of the anti-gay mob? Why not contemplate your own independent moral responsibility? Why not ponder whether your greater responsibility, and greater service, is kindness?

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.